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| 5/24 |
| 2004/2/19 [Health/Disease/AIDS] UID:12304 Activity:nil |
2/18 If you want to defend President Bush, post your defense on MOTD
instead of simply censor it.
Scientists Accuse White House of Distortion:
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=1683040
\_ Further evidence why science should not be politicized.
The piece is partisan fluff by journalists feeding
at the public trough; zero facts just accusatory
demagoguery literally about saving the children.
So I went to the full report:
Global Warming -
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1010124/posts
Air Pollution - no comment because they don't provide
enough evidence. Yes obviously lead
and mercury are bad but exactly how
much money is society willing to spend
to reduce them to parts per trillion
levels. And guess what, lead and mercury
are naturally occurring! Are we going
to scrub the environment clean of these
elemements??
Abstinence / AIDS - AIDS is transmitted by almost
entirely by promiscous homosexuals
engaging literally in tens or 100's of
anonymous unprotected sex acts a
year. Why should I be expected to
pay for someone's reckless acts of
irresponsibility?
All Bush mandated was that the same
amount be spent on abstinence
programs as is spent giving free
birth control pills to HS students
without their parents consent.
\_ Are you really this stupid?
Did you not pay attention in sex ed
during high school? You just massively
discredited yourself. I suppose all the
"fags" forced all the heterosexuals with
AIDS to engage in gay orgies? -John
\_ The percentage of straight victims is
near zero compared to the numbers for gay
males, drug addicts, and men visiting
prostitutes. Once you take the spouses
of bi-sexual men, drug addicts and
'johns' out of the numbers, you don't
have too many non-gay victims in the US
population. John, you're the one who has
massively discredited themself with your
hot button pushing ranting and hysteria.
Calm down, stop knee jerking, smoke a
joint and find some facts.
\_ Has it ever occurred to you that
"the gay community", due to its
historically higher exposure, has
a much higher awareness and
reporting rate for AIDS? Kill all
fags. -John
Endangered species act - tell that to those people in
Klamath falls and those whose
livelihood depends on development
of natural resources. Massive
ongoing cases of scientific
fraud inside the EPA and Forest
Service
\_ Ah, you rail against unsubstantiated
claims, and your evidence is utterly
impeccable. Q.f. 'Other Peoples'
Money", Danny De Vito's diatribe about
buggy whip manufacturers. -John
\_ Say what? Pass that joint over here!
Or at least try again.
\_ I can't, I'm too busy
hysterically ranting against
freeper idiots. -John
Aluminum tubes - I stopped here because this reveals the
entire agenda of the 'paper'. When Islamic
radicals detonate a nuclear weapon
on US soil I hope all those who propose
a policy of capitulation are in the
blast radius.
\_ We should also ban export of screwdrivers
because they can be used to build n00ks.
\_ Standard red herring. This is just like
saying we shouldn't lock our front doors
at night because a burglar can always
break a window. Do you use "password" as
your password because hey they can always
break in using an ssh bug anyway? |
| 5/24 |
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| www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=1683040 At least 58 leading scientists - including Nobel laureates, medical experts, former federal agency directors and university executives - signed a letter accompanying the report circulated by the Union of Concerned Scientists. |
| www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html -> www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/trc.html We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a Northern Hemisphere average temperature index for the 1400-1980 period, using corrected and updated source data. The major finding is that the values in the early 15 th century exceed any values in the 20 th century. UPDATE: March 19, 2004 In response to a couple of requests for an update, here is a quick one. A few papers are undergoing review at some journals, including Steves and my contributions, and there is not a dull page to be found in any of them. McIntyre has been winning squash tournaments and I have started bagpiping lessons . UPDATE: January 22, 2004 Despite the long quiet on this page, the past 7 weeks have been very busy for us. A number of people have written to ask about progress on Part II, while others have interpreted the 7 week gap as a sign that maybe we ran out of material. No, there is a lot of material, and the challenge has been to sift through it and put it into coherent form. There are now some new journals involved in handling material that arose from our paper, and we have held back releasing any of the Part II contents connected to these review processes. Professor Manns response focuses on the role of 3 out of 22 key indicators available in the 15th century portion of the data base. His calculations show that without these series the MBH98 results would look like ours, and his assertion is that we improperly omitted the series in question. Our response will establish that the series in question are in fact inadmissible. Of course the discovery that the 1998 conclusions rest so sensitively on only 3 series already points to the lack of robustness of this famous graph. UPDATE: December 1 We are continuing to work on Part II of our response, which has required a detailed examination of Professor Manns ftp site, hence the delay. We also traveled to Washington DC on November 18, to present a briefing on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, on our work to date. Some interested experts at a European climate lab had privately criticized us for what they regarded as an insufficiently wide circle of reviewers for the E&E paper. We offered to them that they could review Part II before its release, on the condition that if they found errors they could hold us to public account to rectify them, but if the document checks out they would have to issue a statement saying so. After considering it for a week they declined the offer, saying they dont have time to do the review, and would prefer to follow the debates progress in journals. UPDATE: November 11 Our response to the replies thus far from Professor Mann and his colleagues will be presented in three parts. Our overarching goal is to ascertain exactly what data and what computational steps were used by MBH98, so as to focus in as quickly as possible on the real sources of differences between our results. But along the way there are a few new isses that must also be dealt with. Part 1, available here in PDF format responds to the claim that the data we audited was prepared in April 2003 in response to McIntyres request to Mann, and that we ought to have gone to Professor Manns ftp site instead. We show that the data file we were sent was in existence long before April 2003 and had we gone to the ftp site we would have found it contains the same data anyway. This document, by establishing the practical equivalence between Professor Manns ftp site and the data file we were sent, returns our focus to the basic question of data quality and sets the stage for the subsequent parts in which we will extend our existing critique. Part 2 will present a detailed examination of the contents of Professor Manns FTP site, in light of the claim that it is the official repository for the MBH98 data. This document has been sent to some colleagues for their comments and will be made available shortly thereafter. Part 3, now under way, will seek to resolve the outstanding differences between our computational methods and those of MBH. Completion of this part will be contingent on our receiving the specific computer programs MBH used, and we are seeking this disclosure. McKitrick is going to an economics workshop in Manitoba for a couple of days, to discuss the question Does the possibility of climate change imply that we should wash our laundry in cold water? Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes have revised their reply to our paper, see here . They have also corrected some errors in their goodness-of-fit calculations. Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes have made a more detailed reply to our paper, available here in PDF . His reply and our response are available here in MSWord and here in PDF . It introduced the multiproxy method to the study of past climates, and produced what was purported to be a 600-year history of the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the basis for the claim by Environment Canada and many other governmental agencies that the Earth is warmer now than it has been for 600 years. A companion paper published a year later in Geophysical Research Letters extended the 600-year series back to 1000 and spliced a surface temperature record to 1998, producing the famous hockey stick graph of the NH climate. This graph figures prominently in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has been reproduced many times. It was the basis for the claim in pamphlets mailed by the Government of Canada to Canadians in 2002 that said The 20 th Century was the warmest globally for the past 1,000 years. The pamphlets were sent to generate support for ratifying and implementing the Kyoto Protocol in Canada. In 2003, Steven McIntyre, a Toronto business man who specialized in mathematics at university, got interested in the process by which IPCC Reports were being put together and used for driving major policy decisions. Long experience in the mining industry, including close observation of the delinquent accounting that led to the Bre-X scandal, gave him a good nose for promotions based on unaudited claims. It also taught him that when big investments are at stake, due diligence requires relentless testing and independent verification of the data by all parties at every stage. Also, attention must be paid to potential conflicts of interestfor instance the author of a project feasibility study should not also be a major shareholder in the project. These are rigorous requirements in the private sector, yet in the case of the IPCC, chapter authors routinely promote their own research. This makes it even more important that there be external auditing of the reports foundation. The Mann hockey stick curve was given central prominence in the 2001 IPCC Report. If this is true, the Mann, Bradley and Hughes paper should have no problem passing a detailed audit. Since governments around the world including here in Canada are making some very expensive policy decisions based on uncritical acceptance of the IPCC Report, an independent review seemed in order, and indeed should be a mere formality. McIntyre obtained the underlying data set from Professor Michael Mann of the University of Virginia. Based on some apparent difficulties experienced by Manns associates in supplying the data set, he surmised that it was possible that no one had ever previously requested the data set and that it would be a worthwhile endeavour to try to replicate the famous graph. In the summer of 2003 he contacted Ross McKitrick , an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and coauthor of Taken By Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming , to discuss his findings to that point. Their paper has been published in the British journal Energy and Environment . We have created an audit trail so that third parties can verify these findings for themselves. This includes what we think is the first Internet posting of the original proxy data used in Mann et al 1998. To verify the collation errors resulting in duplication of 1980 entries in the data, one needs only inspect a few numbers. Weve created excerpts from the data ... |
| www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1010124/posts If it withstands scrutiny, the collective scientific understanding of recent global warming might need an overhaul. A little background is needed to understand the importance of the new research behind this paper by Stephen McIntyre, a statistics expert who works in the mining industry, and Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Ontario. As scientists and governments have tried to understand mankinds influence on the environment, global warming has become a primary concern. Do mankinds activities especially burning fossil fuels to create energy affect climate? These parameters can be tweaked to force the model to show ANY desired result. Projections of climate change are based on models and assumptions which are not only unknown, but unknowable within ranges relevant for policy-making Models fail to adequately handle clouds, water vapour, aerosols, precipitation, ocean currents, solar effects, complex weather patterns, etc. Model simulation of surface temperature appears to be little more than fortuitous curve-fitting rather than a demonstration of human influence on global climate. Temperature rise projections this century are unknown and unknowable. Climate models are projections, story lines, more aptly termed fairy tales. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist, University of Virginia, Environmental Policy Project PREDICTING THE PAST: Climate models, which serve as the basis for long-term climate predictions, have clearly failed when tested against observed climate data. Models fail to reproduce the known difference in trends between the lower troposphere and surface temperatures over the past 20 years. They dont show the actual amount of temperature change at the Earths surface Models cant predict the recent past, let alone the long-term future. Antarctica has been cooling since 1966, directly contradicting model results that suggest that warming will be more pronounced in the Earths polar regions. You have raised new points that deserve analysis to the extent that I am capable. Regarding the results of McIntyre and McKitrick, there is some ongoing discussion of it on this blog that is both interesting, confusing, and disturbing: Quark Soup Dr. Mann is indicating that McIntyre and McKitrick used an incorrectly compiled data set, which may well be true. Mann has not been particularly forthcoming in response to their requests, which may also be true. Mann indicates that other researchers have replicated his results independently, which also appears to be true. At this point about all that can be said is that the analysis of McIntyre and McKitrick, while perhaps a valid analysis, may not have been conducted on the proper data. A dataset that should have contained 159 columns of data in fact only contained 112 columns. So when M&M slid this dataset into their calculations, the results that came out were naturally in error . Something not Kosher here, the spreadsheet was apparently rebuilt by M&M using original data, and the analysis run on that original data is what provided M&Ms final output, not the spreadsheet sent to them by Manns office. As provided by M&M, their approach of publishing in Energy and Environment is consistant with who they are. Neither are in the Climate community and they do not claim to be doing original research, merely auditing the data and methods of Mann to determine reproducibility of Manns result using Manns dataset. They have provided exposure of both their papers, data used, methodology to the world via the internet, anyone may compare Manns methods, results & data against M&Ms claims. Mann will do it directly to McIntyre and McKitrick, since he apparently doesnt think much of their effort to analyze his data. Publishing the audit paper in Energy and Environment may cause Mann to not bother to reply, as he might figure that would lend more credence to their results than he wants to give them. Had they published in a a more established science journal, particularly one focused on climate science, he would have been obligated forced to respond. It will be interesting to see if the media pressure and the pressure from the skeptical community on him will be sufficient to get him to respond. The only way that you can have a global temperature record from regional proxy data is to create a combined/merged data set. If you look at the figure I posted, you can see that the Esper curve, which is only for tree-ring data in the Northern Hemisphere, is much noisier than the merged datasets from the other groups. Furthermore, continental Antarctica is actually cooling, whilst the Antarctic Peninsula, the coast, and the adjacent ocean waters are warming. That in part explains why the rise at the end of the Vostok record is not as dramatic as the instrumental surface data which appears at the end of the figure above. This mistake is made over and over and over again, and its one of the ways that the hockey stick critics have tried to assess his data. Regional temperature variability is always going to be greater than a merged data set, because the peaks in one region may be partially or completely canceled by troughs in another region. However, note something: the location of the warm and cold periods still generally coincides with the other records. The only point of dispute regards the magnitude of the warmest peaks around 400 and 900-1000 AD compared to the end of the ice core record. By the way, at what year exactly is the Vostok ice core temperature record considered to end? This time period includes all of the Industrial Revolution which began in the mid-1800s. The start of the Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of the large-scale exploitation of fossil fuels. The small dip in temperature in the early 1800s was caused by volcanic eruptions which reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the Earths surface. After 1958, the data are from annual air measurements, not ice core proxies, and are therefore of higher quality. So if this is correct, then in your plot the temperature data only goes to 1958. In which case the temperature rise over the last 40 years, which would increase the endpoint of your graph by at least 025 C, isnt shown. Its useful to look at Vostok data over 400,000 years, because on that scale what happens in 500-1000 years is integrated by the climate system into the precipitation signal. But in the modern timeframe, the Antarctic is partially decoupled from processes happening in the rest of the world. As a final aside, Manns multi-proxy data record includes six ice-core records, but does not include the Vostok ice core data. I have no idea if Vostok was excluded because of what I said above, or for other reasons. The other is global temperture dependance upon CO2 concentration is grossly overstated hence a perceived decoupling on the part of those wedded to a CO2->Global Warming dependancy. CO 2 -Temperature Correlations 1 correlation does not prove causation, 2 cause must precede effect, and 3 when attempting to evaluate claims of causal relationships between different parameters, it is important to have as much data as possible in order to weed out spurious correlations. And do you see why the graph you posted doesnt allow a direct comparison to the graph of several temperature reconstruction histories that I posted, because it doesnt show the warming since the mid-1800s which is 06-08 C in the surface instrumental record? On the length of the solar cycle and Earths climate PDF document I have to leave it at that for today, as I have to get out into the twilight early with three sugar-craving toddlers. What is the predicted CO2 change that the global warmist eco-enviros fear? AS I inderstand their previous crisis summaries, we have already gotten about 1/3 through the maximum rise in CO2 they fear. Yet - temps if theyve risen - and that is debatable are only up 1/2 -1/3 of a degree. Why then are they predicting so large a temp increase, if so little is already changed? Do their computer models add a fudge factor to continue ramping temperature UP after the CO2 levels are stable? Or are they predicting massive failures of everything global folloding, drought, fe... |